Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

I’ve enjoyed the RHL and FC distros quite a bit. They’re popular, they put a lot of effort into the Desktop experience, and they’ve been fairly easy to install and maintain. Now a lot of users have complained about the dreaded “RPM Hell” where one package depends upon another which depends upon a third. That’s not to say I haven’t had problems with RPM, but I’ve been a pretty resourceful guy and have been able to use the resources of the net to figure out and install the dependencies fairly quickly.So to fix it, there were tools created. First Red Hat Network and then APT-RPM. Red Hat didn’t see the need for a depsolver when it could sell you a service to do it for you — Red Hat Network. And APT-RPM was, well, RPM shoe-horned into APT.

Today, in the FC community we have Yum and now Smart. Smart is very apt-like. Yum is not. Yum’s problem is that it doesn’t handle multiple repos well. It did at one point have a “pkgpolicy=last” option to give “priority” to repos in their config file. However, it was removed without a deprecation cycle, and I started noticing non base FC4 packages overwriting FC4 packages (eg…. Dovecot overriding IMAP). Instead, Yum decided to define priorities per package instead of per repo. At that point I stopped being a Yum fan and started searching for alternatives. And that’s when I found Smart which handles multiple repos well.

The second coming of RPM Hell is when new users realize that neither Fedora and Fedora Extras have what they need (like an MP3 player or maybe LiVES), so they find ATRpms, Livna, Dag, FreshRPMS and mistakenly add them to their yum config. On the next yum update, they have a broken system, and can’t figure out how to fix the dependencies in order to get, say, gnome working again.

And it will happen unless packagers (and depsolvers) realize they can’t make arbitrarily broad, sweeping decisions for the user.

Say your prayers.
–Rob